The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

July 8, 2010

Ágnes Nemes Nagy

Ágnes Nemes Nagy [Hungary]1922-1991

Born in Budapest to a family with Transylvanian ties, Ágnes Nemes Nagy studied Hungarian and Latin at the University of Budapest, but her "intellectual birth," as she puts it, took place at a Calvinist gymnasium for girls with the renowned poet, Lajor Áprily, at its head.

She began her career as an editor for the post-war literary review Újold (New Moon), which was banned in 1948. Her first book, Kettös világban (In a Dual World) was published and welcomed by the reviewers in 1946. A victim of the "szilencium," she could not publish again for nearly ten years. From 1953 to 1958 she taught in a secondary shcool. It was only in 1957, with the publication of Száravillám (Heat Lighting), that she came to the forefront of Hungarian poetry. After the publication of this book, she began to support herself from her own writing and translating works from German, French, and English.

Her third book of poems, Napforduló (Solstice), appeared in 1967, and brought her international attention. Other books followed, and in 1969 and 1981 she published collected works of her poetry, the first titled A lovogok és az angyalok (The Horses and the Angels), the second titled Között (Between). With her husband, the critic Baláczs Lengyle, she spent several months at the University of Iowa on a Writers' Visiting Fellowship. In 1983 she was awarded the prestigious Kossuth Prize. By the time of her death in 1991, she was recognized as one of Hungary's leading poets. She also wrote essays and poetry for children.

Nemes Nagy described herself as an "objective lyric poet," attracted to both objects and the objectivity of the lyric tone.

My contemporary. He died, not I.He fell near Tobruk, poor boy.He was English. Other names, for us,tell the places where, like ripe nuts,heads fell and cracked in twos,those portable radios,their poise of parts and volumefiner than the Eiffel, lovely spinal columnas it crashed down to the earth.That's how I think you your youth —like a dotard who doesn't knownow from fifty years ago,his heart in twilight, addle pated.

But love is complicated.

—Translated from the Hungarian by Bruce Berlind

(from Szárazvillám, 1957)

Revenant

This was the table. Surface, and legs.This the wire, the lamp.There was a glass to hand. It's hereThis was the water. And I drank it.

And I looked out the window.And I saw: the mist fell aslantthe field of an evening,a big heavenly willow dippedinto eclipsed waters,and I looked out the windowand I had eyes. And I had arms.

Now I live round chairlegs,reach the knee of objects.Then I shouldered through a space.And such birds, such space.Like a flaming garland'sruffled leaves, tearing, flaringthey flew, muttering in swarms,driven by a pulseas if a heart split,flew into birdbits —That was the fire. That was the sky

I leave. I'd fingerthe floorboard, if I could.Draughty. I dodgein the street. I am not.

—Translated from the Hungarian by Hugh Maxton

(from Napforduló, 1967)

The Sleeping Horsemento Lajos Kassáck

December. Noon. Eye-scorchingsnowfiled broad as a hillside.On the flat slope a heap of flagstone.On its round edgesa hot, white, snowsheet:a small pile of sleeping Bedouins.

And deep down under the shorewhat kind of bedouin horses,their shapes here and there heaving,as inside the stable corridors,silently, invisibly, they paw,and their root-bearded large manesbegin to sway underground —

And what is this motion whenon the hot earth-horses' backsthe earthy brown trunks stretch,leafy-haired, higher and higher,and with one slow stupendous leapspring out.

—Translated from the Hungarian by Bruce Berlind

(from Napforduló, 1967)

Between

The great sleeves of air,air on which the birdand the science of birds bearthemselves, wings on the fraying argument;incalculable resultof a moment's leafy silhouettebark and branch of a haze living upwardslike desire into the upper leavesto inhale every three secondsthose big, frosty angels.

Downweight. On the plainthe mountain's motionless shocksas they lie or kneelpeaks and escarpments,geology's figure-sculpture,the glen's a moment's distractionand once more the forms and rocks,chalky bone to outlineinto identity of pleated stone.

Aches and stabbings,visions, voiceless aqueducts,inarticulate risings,unbearable tensionof verticals between up and down.

Climates. Conditions.Between. Stone. Tanktraces.A strip of black reed rimming the plainwritten in two lines, in the lake, the sky,two black plaques of signsystem,diacritic on the stars —

Between the sky and the sky.

—Translated from the Hungarian by Hugh Maxton

(from Napforduló, 1967)

Statues

Bitter.It was bitter, the sea, whenI rolled through the rock-throat downa spiral staircase. A shingle, I spun,behind me the hum of snail-shelllike memory in an abandoned house,I rattledlike a skullfull of shrapnel.

Whose is this hunk?Who was it, from a mountainous shale-chunkwith monstrous passion hackedthis indifference out?

And the plates of sheet-iron on me, the sheet-iron.Banged-up boxes,as they reflected their stammering light,—a plane-wreck glitters like this,but inside what sirs still lives,a smatter of blood on the watchstrap,—I lay smeared out on the rock,life—the filth of it—on a stone.

Nothing more stubborn, more stubborn,you fling yourself into a stone,fling into a thing, fling into a stoneyour living neck,it's already a stone season,its switched-off life half-blind,who sculpted this indifference?who was it, from a mountainous shale-chunkchiseled your living neck?

Salt and sand and above them the rock-hunk,gouged out cave-like in the sky,this relative eternity,this half-light of minerals—

the water murmurs, murmurs, its bed an Earth:bitterness in a stone cask.

—Translated from the Hungarian by Bruce Berlind

(from Napforduló, 1967)

Akhenaton in Heaven

All these things are the same. The mine.A mountainside torn to the foot. Implements.As he touches the limestonethe dawn's uncertain.As if dawning from inside,on the rock's thin face,and stone and iron transparentas after an ultimate dysfunction.

There the forest.The fog walks about in fragments.five-fingered, like abandoned handsor hands that stretch up vertical,a motion almost of tractionand yet of not reaching to their meaning,they float palely to the groundas they trail —as they expand and tumble,vaporous, attenuated trunks,another forest walks among the treesand drives another foliage.

A tunnel under the leaves.Dark grass, gravel:a set of narrow-gauge lines, at daybreak.The sun is coming now, steaming,piercing the fogs of a lateral angel,mute rumbling recurs,metal in the grass sparkles,morning sparkles,till suddenly a hedge springs upfor the lines end there in the grass.Beyond, just a few sleeperslike unsteady steps ahead —on the clearing the sun stays.

Fore-noon. Great plants.The great chamomile meadow is still,pieces of iron in it,honeycomb density over it,white-spoked plants the sunswhite galaxy without waves and now wind.Always. Forever. Noon.